]]>While the past few years have presented us with more than a handful of evil real-world businesses, they still pale in comparison to those in film. Sure, Madoff swindled billions out of trusting investors, but he never sent Rob Lowe to shut down a brake pad factory in Ohio. That’s a special kind of sick.

This list is meant to focus on the other bad businesses that we’ve seen in film in the past 25 years or so. You won’t find Cyberdyne, Brown & Williamson, Zorg Industries, Weyland-Yutani, Umbrella Corp., Buy ‘N Large, and Rekall on this list. Those mega-corporations have had their day in the sun and have been done to death. Let’s examine some smaller and less obvious choices.

9. Cobra Kai Dojo – The Karate Kid

Most people think of Cobra Kai as just a collection of Aryan jerks that arbitrarily pick one kid and make his life hell. Which is true, they totally do that.

But bear in mind that Cobra Kai Dojo is also a business, presumably bankrolled by Sensei John Kreese (and possibly by his ponytailed billionaire friend in III). I mean, he’s not running a charity. So not only is someone teaching these kids to make Daniel-San’s life a living hell, but they’re getting paid to do it. Somehow, it seems much more sinister that someone was profiting financially from Daniel-San’s misery.

When Kreese went to the bank to get a small business loan do you think he listed as a bullet point in presented a flowchart that basically read “Just bully the hell out of a random 16 year-old kid =====> Financial Independence!”? I bet you do know.

This revelation also begs the question: Were Sensei Kreese’s motives strictly financial? This whole time, I thought he’d bee teaching his students to lash out at Daniel because of some misguided vendetta against weakness, or maybe some unresolved issues with his own step-dad, but what if he did this every year with a new class of students and a new victim?

It’s not altogether infeasible. And way more evil.

8. OCP (Omni Consumer Products) – RoboCop

As we kick this off, a note to those with the authority to offer government contracts to firms with Globo-, Cyber, or Omni in their name: Please don’t. It doesn’t end well. Go with firms with names like “Frank’s Security,” or “FamilyTime Cyborgs.”

Unfortunately, the fictitious civic leaders of Old Detroit in RoboCop predated this plea. No knowing any better, they outsourced their entire police force to OCP, a giant corporation that gets off to an ignominious start to the task at hand when their law enforcement robot prototype, ED-209, blasts the ever-loving shit out of one of their own board members during a conference room presentation. The project is tabled and they search for cyborgs on a smaller scale.

To make a short story long, OCP Senior President Dick Jones hires a criminal mastermind to kill a cop, thus providing a corpse for their newer cyborg prototype. Jones is one of those businessmen that only exists in the movies. Someone you could never believe anyone is that evil for any company.

Actually, Kurtwood Smith (the aforementioned mastermind) can sum this whole thing up was faster than I can.

Never mind that the plan is very circuitous and wildly impractical. If someone presented me on an investment opportunity that involved cleaning up Detroit, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. It’s also, just sinister. I mean, Dick Jones was a bad guy, but he couldn’t have launched the whole “kill a cop to secure a corpse for the cyborg program” plan without at least some administrative help, which leads one to leads one to believe that this kind of action wasn’t out of the norm of OCP’s daily operations. Can we get a spin-off to see what other sinister projects they had going down?

7. Initech – Office Space

What’s not evil about Initech? They make their employees park miles away from the office, they ask employees to work weekends late on a Friday, and during office parties, there is often a paucity of cake. Is it as bad as Omni Consumer Products (above), who murdered for financial gain? Yes. Yes it is.